What Happened 2024

For the last several election cycles, Catalist has published a comprehensive report on the electorate as part of its What Happened series. These reports are published in the spring following general elections, after state election officials have made public voter file data available. Waiting for these core vote file updates ensures that Catalist's analysis is as comprehensive as possible.

What Happened is worth the wait. While immediate election results, exit polls and partial analysis can inform our views about turnout and voting patterns, we strongly encourage clients, partners and funders to hold off on making major decisions about investments for future election cycles until all voter file data is available and thoroughly analyzed. Catalist's What Happened analysis uses advanced modeling and machine learning to build a picture of the electorate up from the precinct level, including more than 240 billion data points for 329 million individual-level records, the latest Census data and public and private polling.

Early data and analysis can be unreliable. The narratives that form on election night and in the following weeks are often contradicted — or at least greatly complicated — by later analysis. Full voter file information also lets us deeply examine demographic patterns, including among subgroups and in specific states, in ways that polling and other analysis simply can't replicate earlier in the year.

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